Imperial Palace Card Room Review. Discuss Imperial Palace Card Room Review, on ChipTalk.net the place to go for your Poker chips and gambling tips. Read it in Card Room Reviews.
Games offered: Hold-em only Number of tables: 8, 4 tables normally running cash games, other 4 for tournaments.
This is review is based on my trip almost exactly a year ago. I will update it if needed after my next trip in a few months.
The Imperial Palace is an older, lower end hotel/casino that has a great location on the strip and offers some of the cheaper gambling options on the strip, if you can stand the smell.
Imperial palace at night.
Pros
Soft Competition
Good Comp rate
Fast Drink Service
Cheap tournaments
Larger than average tables
Cons
Loud: lots of casino noise
A bit run down
Not the highest quality dealers
Bathroom far away and not very pleasant
Games/stakes available
2-4 limit and 1-2 NL Hold-em mostly. Occasionally 3-6 or 4-8 limit and 2-5 NL.
Two daily tournaments 7 days a week: (Times of tournaments change without notice.)
Noon: $60 NL HE
8:00 $80 pm NL HE
Decor and atmosphere
The poker room is located directly to the left of the main doors of the Hotel/Casino. It is "walled off" from the main casino by a waist high wall. This means it is a very noisy room as you can hear all of the slot-machines located 10 feet away in the Casino.
Sign up is simply talk to the floor person. There are no monitors or even a white board. However there never seemed to be many people waiting for a table. In my 4 visits to this room the longest wait I had was 20 min.
Like the rest of the Imperial Palace this room is not exactly high class. Some of the tables had ads printed on them others had a side bet game called Flop-a-Lock on them (more on this later.) However the tables are VERY large. 10 people comfortably fit around these tables. The dealers really have to stretch to collect bets. While not in horrible conditions some of the felts were a bit worn looking.
View of the poker room taken from the Casino floor.
Quality of opponents
The softest game by far I found while in Vegas. Except for the few regular old timers milking this soft game, most of the people playing were horrible and many were drunk.
Some tables offer Flop-a-Lock a table bet (A HUGE sucker bet. you can bet up to $3 and get paid on a the 3 card hand the flop makes. 1-1 for a pair, 3-1 for a flush, 6-1 for a straight, 30-1 for 3 of a kind, and 40-1 for a straight flush.) If you ever want to find the sucker at a table, find the one betting the flop lock! At one table I was at 4 of the 9 players were betting this bet. (When I talked about this in my blog the owner of the Flop-a-Lock game had read it and though it was funny so sent me free swag.)
While this side game is useful for quickly identifying fish, it does slow the game down and can lead to misdeals as the all the extra action may confuse the dealer. (A turn card that gave me a straight had to be buried since the dealer after paying the side game forgot to have a round of betting for the flop.)
Chips
Hot stamped clays (maybe Paulsons). I was there before I found chiptalk.net, so wasn't too into chips then. I know shame on me.
Cash game $1 chip
Additional perks
There is a bar right in the poker room, and the wait-staff was very attentive so drink service was VERY fast. This led to a very social table (a plus in my book) and a lot of drunken play (another plus in my book).
Poker comps were $2 /hr among the highest in Vegas. I do not know if this is still the case as The Imperial Palace player club is now just part of Harrah's general reward cards.
Reviewers Comments
As a low stakes player, I really enjoyed playing in the Imperial Palace's room. The soft play and fast drink service made up for the shabbiness of the room.
Myself (in the white shirt) at the table.
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